i am going to post this as a bug since it is possible that the recipe was overlooked for balancing mechanics
((TLDR)) balance book / bookshelf crafting because due to issues with the recipe it takes roughly 1652 items plus excessive amounts of time to make a stack bookcases. below is a detailed description of the broken crafting mechanics and the severity of the issue.
I am starting this as a bug report rather than a suggestion in hopes that the game can get a little bit better in the unbalanced crafting department. as you all know jeb added leather as a required component in the book crafting recipe making an already resource intensive decoration block even more difficult to obtain. there are several critical blunders in the crafting recipe that result in a massive waste of input resources for a very small output.
before the changes, books cost 6 sugar cane. it takes 3 pieces of paper to yield 1 book and 3 books are required for a bookshelf. a bit wasteful but still doable due to the way sugar cane can be cultivated like a crop in large fields. additionally bookshelves cost 6 blocks of wood this is where it starts to break down in terms of materials required vs blocks created.
if anyone has looked at a bookshelf in real life one would notice they only use a few small pieces of wood and consist mostly of empty space. the sheer amount of wood required for the recipe is not just wasteful but we start to see a violation of the most basic concept in the laws of physics namely the law of conservation of mass and energy. where any item made must equal the sum total mass of it's component parts or return the extra mass as byproducts or at least convert the extra mass into energy. most recopies that rely on shaped crafting compensate you for excess materials by increasing the output. so now we have a difficult recipe where the materials required are in exponentially larger quantities than the physical size and quantity of the resulting bookcase.
here is where the issue comes in since sugar cane and wood are fairly easy to make and the wasteful recipe doesn't matter that much but it is time consuming to grow and cultivate the materials needed for the bookshelf. with the addition of leather to the book recipe, the recipe while not unrealistic becomes exceedingly hard to complete since it forces players to rely on a mob drop that unlike sheep which can be sheared cows must be slaughtered to collect it. while cows can be bread for easy leather collection the fact remains that cows don't always drop leather nor do they consistently drop any quantity of the item that would be a realistic quantity of hide from a animal that size. additionally this requires the slaughter of about 3 cows to one bookshelf on a good day combined with the breeding delay and amount of wheat required to breed.
so basically we have a recipe for a single blocks that requires the following
9 sugar cane
6 or more wheat to breed cows
3 pieces of leather requiring the slaughter of 3 separate cows on a good day up to 5 - 6 cows when drop rates are slow
this yields only 3 books BTW
now add to those 3 books another 6 planks and you have one whopper of a material list for just one single block
now for a stack of bookcases the total material cost is around
6*64 or 384 planks around 96 logs which is a lot of trees.
the book requirement is 3*64 or 192 books which is 192 pieces of leather that would require probably around 200-250 cows and to breed 200 - 250 cows it requires days of work and 500 wheat. and
576 sugar cane.
so in total a stack of shelves is
96 logs -384 planks
192 leather
250 cows
500 wheat
and 576 sugar cane
a total of 1652 items for net product of 64 single blocks
i am sorry but there is defiantly something wrong with this input output ratio and if the development team would revisit the issue they would see this.
an average library can contain many stacks and honestly i would probably have to switch from integers to scientific notation to count the material requirements.
but in all i think switching back to paper back books while still an excessively wasteful recipe will be a lot more friendly to the environment and stop the genocide of cattle for the time being.
((TLDR)) Balance Recipe or increase yield. the current production of the book shelf is a severely broken crafting mechanic
i would like this reopened
Comments
This is not a bug and should not be put here.
it actually falls under balance issue which is almost as bad as a bug but the flagging system is broken atm
I agree with you Mike. Stairs should also be made with only 3 materials.
I don't see an issue, I see challenge. I like the actual balance.

This is not a bug. This feature works as intended. For feature requests, post them on the MC forums.
Farming wood is easy, farming sugar cane is easy, but THREE TO SIX COWS PER BOOKSHELF?
Personally, I don't actually mind this.
As bookshelves are purely decorational, apart from the better item enchantment, which is probably supposed to be expensive, I don't see a balance issue here.
But I also wouldn't mind if the bookshelf recipe would produce for example two or four bookshelves instead of one.
i guess the point i am trying to make is that bookshelves are used for building large scale libraries and need to be producible in sizable quantities
@cube the third
Please reopen this topic as it is quite clear that you are closing this out of a personal disagreement with the topic and not using proper judgement as a moderator
please reference https://mojang.atlassian.net/browse/MC-2302
where mod DO specifically states that balance issues if they are severe should be posted as bugs considering the amount of materials and time required for this recipe not only is it severe but may lead to repetitive strain disorders such as carpel tunnel syndrome. while it may "" work as intended "" it is still a balance issue that needs to be revisited by the dev team and not buried by a disgruntled mod
Mike, the MC-2302 recommend bug reports for SEVERE balance issues. It's not the books are too hard to craft now, they were too easy before.
Sure leather may be a problem in early game, but just build a small cow farm, a small wheat farm, and you'll have more leather than you know what to do with. Add a Looting I or even Looting II sword and you'll get even more.
Also, there is no need for a fully-automated-redstony-thingy farm, just fences will do. For wheat, use the villages design. No offense, but if you intend to build such a huge library, those farms would be no problem for you.
In my opinion, this makes the game better, as you now have a reason to build stuff. In my world I want to have a fully-automated cow / mooshroom farm. For that I want colored wool to aid the redstone circuit, so I need to build a sheep farm. My sheep farm design requires lots of wood, so I built a tree farm. On that tree farm, I needed bonemeal, so I built a skeleton farm, that also works as XP grinder. That's how I like to play and it's really fun for me. Just an opinion.
You can try e-mailing or tweeting the developers, the chances of a reply are low, but they do read the messages. I liked Jonathan Haas idea, but I don't think any change is needed.
TLDR: Books are not harder to craft now, they were too easy before. You only NEED bookshelves for enchanting, and that was reduced to 15 shelves for max enchanting - no balance issue. If you want to build a 1x1 replica of US congress library on survival, it SHOULD be hard for you 😉

I have reconsidered closing this issue report, at your request, and discussed it with other Mods. We all agree this is a feature request and not a bug, and this ticket remains closed.
This bug is listed as fixed in the list of fixed bugs on the launcher screen. What was the final decision by Mojang?
yes they listed it as fixed and there are no changes to any recipie
I think that was a list of resolved tickets that were not duplicates, not actual fixed bugs. In this case the "fix" was saying "No, we won't change it back."
I've discovered it's actually not hard to get that much leather, if you can find 2 cows to start with (Notch y u nerf animal spawning?)
WOW! that is LOTS!
That should definitely be changed!